Solution: replace the current HP-tick effect of poison with a temporary stat debuff, say -1 STR/DEX/CON per 25 turns' worth of poison. There's no continuing damage effect, so you can just rest it out, but at the same time its effects become much more relevant in the middle of a fight.

Should it be limited to STR/DEX/CON? Surely the monsters have figured out that some clever folks use INT and WIS and would adapt to that? Especially since Mages and Priests basically only care about CON of those. Poison would be a lot more threatening if it robbed you of SP and failrates.

It could also drop speed, while we're at it. It would be rather brutal, since STR loss can already do that, and it would quite possibly force people to cure poison every time they get poisoned. The obvious answer is to make that harder, but that just feels mean somehow.

i think poison is fine right now, doing hp damage. if anything, some poisons can be a bit too strong. i'm not sure what mob it is, maybe the tarantula, but there's a few poisonous mobs that do little melee damage ,but a ton of poison damage, way more than they should.
i would just change the disturb to only work when you are in the red. i can read, i see the POISONED text on the screen.

Should it be limited to STR/DEX/CON? Surely the monsters have figured out that some clever folks use INT and WIS and would adapt to that? Especially since Mages and Priests basically only care about CON of those. Poison would be a lot more threatening if it robbed you of SP and failrates.

It could also drop speed, while we're at it. It would be rather brutal, since STR loss can already do that, and it would quite possibly force people to cure poison every time they get poisoned. The obvious answer is to make that harder, but that just feels mean somehow.

I don't have a problem with having different poisons that impact different stats, but conceptually the current "poisoned" status is clearly some kind of physical ailment, considering the HP damage. I think it does have some moderate direct effect on device failure rates, to-hit, to-dam, etc., but I haven't checked spell failure rates.

I have complained about the poison dot preventing resting for ages. Every time there are new brilliant ideas for a solution, but never does anything change. It would already be a great improvement if the poison dot got simply removed, which should be easy to do. Whenever someone feels like implementing a good poison functionality later, it can then be added.

Or maybe just have poison damage only interrupt the player if the game can calculate that such poison will be fatal? Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup has deterministic* poison, and can display if the poison will kill you or not.

*There's a small edge case, where if the poison will BARELY kill you, but the specific timing of your regeneration ticks might save you by one HP, it will display that it is fatal. Presumably this edge case could also be stamped out, but no one has put the developer work into it yet.

I used to play just like you. It took me awhile to overcome the desire to kill everything. Now I only want to kill things that are worth my while. That has greatly increased my success rate in Angband. This mainly occurred when the novelty of all these mystical super powerful monsters wore off. I remember Great Wyrms of Balance were these legendary monsters to be awed at and if I could kill one that would be a story to live to tell about. But when I finally killed all the Uniques and beat the game, that desire was sated. I've learned it's very fun to sneak around dangerously OOD, carefully picking fights. It's fun to see how fast I can beat the game, though I'm still not very efficient in my doings and prone to becoming distracted by unnecessary side-quests.

If you play paranoidedly, detect regularly, inspect every monster and don't become too comfortable then winning is merely a matter of applying discipline and experience.

One thing that continues to get me in Angband is after there has been a long period of not being seriously challenged (even if I'm descending at a decent pace) I'm liable to get lax, forgetting that serious danger can crop up at any time; and does when I least expect it, and so I don't inspect the C or the p carefully and bam, dead (oh, that was the mouth of Sauron, woops). The only deaths that really stick out to me as being truly unavoidable are deaths by Drolems playing as a warrior since they are monsters that are out of depth for their depth, compounded by the fact that they are only detected by monster detection, which warriors generally don't get before DL60s-70s.

TOing monsters away that can one shot you should have you very paranoid and cautious the rest of the time you are on that level.

I still die to stubborness: 'but I wasted half my {splendid} arrows trying to kill the thing, I'm not just gonna abandon the fight simply because my odds of not dying have grown dismally small'. I never regret, later, having abandoned the fight. It's just for the first 20 minutes or so that it's painful. It's a good learning experience to abandon when you really don't want to. But I often forget to tell myself there will be better opportunities deeper in the dungeon. Also, the more games I play, the less it bothers me when I die. 98% of the fun is the journey to Morgoth, not actually fighting him.

my real problem, as a player, is that i play too much and too fast. i load angband, and for the first half hour i check every move by every mob. three hours later i waltz into a melee with 3 high-risk mobs and then go "WHAAT?!? HOW DI HE ...!! WT...man this **** game ..."